8. CHAPTER SEVEN
Ciara looked as if she’d seen a ghost, her swollen pink lips and brown eyes opening wide as we stared at each other.
I’d been getting on the elevator to go and pack my things to bring back to our flat now that Team Scotland had been eliminated from the curling event, but as soon as the doors had opened my nose was filled with her all-too familiar cinnamon scent.
The doors started to close and I held a hand out to block them, my eyes raking over Ciara’s disheveled appearance and the scent of another alpha all over her.
A low growl left my chest before I could catch it and the noise seemed to shake Ciara out of whatever stupor she’d been in since I’d greeted her.
“Hello, Leith,” she said with a sigh as she edged past me and out of the elevator. “I feel like we keep running into each other.”
Her words were airy and detached, but I could hear the tightness in her voice as she put distance between us.
It had taken me almost a year to get over Ciara Callaghan after she left to go back to America to be with her family.
I’d called her countless times over that year, but she mostly only responded to texts and even then she’d put distance between us. It was like she’d rebuilt the walls that I’d worked so hard to break down over our three months together and I was now blocked out entirely.
An embarrassing sap of a man was what I turned into and I still winced when I thought of it now.
It had taken an intervention from Connor and the rest of the curling team to get my head back on straight. I deleted her number from my phone and washed my hands of the whole fucking thing.
Then I’d met Enzo and Artie a few months later and the rest was history—or so I thought.
Seeing her skate and then running into her outside of the club had thrown me. She was still just as gorgeous as she’d been four years ago, all long warm brown limbs and soft curves.
It was like a punch to the gut to see her and watch her run away from me again.
I’d told my pack everything about my past and they knew more about my time with Ciara than anyone else. Artie had told me to go after her, but I could feel Enzo’s disapproval through the bond and that had made me stay rooted in place as we watched her disappear back into the club.
Enzo was technically our pack leader. He made sure we were all safe and cared for. Not to mention that he’d been on the receiving end of a lot of my anxiety-ridden bullshit pertaining to Ciara and I was fairly sure his opinion of her wasn’t great.
So, like the eejit I was, I stayed and let her go.
But there must have been someone on my side somewhere in the universe because she stood in front of me now.
“Ciara, wait.” I reached for her hand only for her to yank it clean out of my reach.
“Why?” Ciara asked, crossing her arms over her chest. I wanted to bury my nose there and inhale her scent deep into my lungs, but I kept my spine straight, reminding myself that I was a bonded alpha and that sort of thing only flew with Artie’s permission.
“I just wanted to talk to you and get…” I tried to find the words. “I dunno closure or something.”
My words were stupid even to my own ears, and judging by Ciara’s snort of derision, they were to hers too.
“Closure? Why would you need closure? I’m not the one who blocked you. You blocked me.” Her words were like the lash of a whip, harsh enough to make me flinch as she shot them at me.
“It wasn’t healthy. None of that bullshit over that year was healthy.”
The long spiraling phone calls, the text-tag that we constantly played, the surface level conversations where she would hint that something was going on but would also refuse to talk about it.
Or the fact that I was head over heels in love with her and she wouldn’t—or couldn’t—admit to the same.
Ciara’s eyes sparkled with angry tears that she quickly blinked away, never one to show weakness. “Then it sounds like you got all of the closure you need. I hope you’re healthy now.”
She whirled around and started to walk away.
Reaching for her, I snagged her wrist and pulled her around as gently as I could manage but she still growled at me and began to slap at my chest.
“Ciara—” I began, but stopped when she shook her head roughly.
“No. I’m not doing this with you,” Ciara snapped, finally managing to wrench her wrist away. “I broke my rules for you, Leith. All of them.”
Despite it being early in the morning, there were already several people already in the lobby and I could feel their eyes on us as Ciara’s voice echoed off of the glass walls.
Ciara glanced over at them before sucking in a deep breath and squaring her shoulders.
“I hope you are happy with your pack, they seem lovely, but I don’t want to see you again. Ever.”
With that she whirled on her heel and hurried away from me.
Scrubbing a tired hand over my face I watched as she ducked through the doors and disappeared. It was all so fucking stupid. When was I ever going to learn that every interaction I had with Ciara Callaghan would inevitably end this way?
Our flat was quiet when I stepped inside, my duffel bag in one hand and a bag of breakfast in the other.
My insides were still smarting from the interaction I’d just had with Ciara and I was doing my best to insulate my end of the bond so as not to alert my packmates to my misery.
I shouldn’t have felt as awful as I did. We hadn’t ever even properly dated and she’d completely burned me four years ago. And yet it felt like she’d stomped all over my heart once again.
Dropping my duffel, I set the bag of food on the counter and put my face in my hands, trying to gather myself.
“You just need a cuddle with Artie,” I told myself as I unpacked the food. “A cuddle with Artie always makes everything better.”
Artie had been the balm that soothed all of my cracks three years ago and he was always willing to soothe one of his wayward alphas if we ever needed it.
Enzo usually refused, claiming that alphas were the ones who were supposed to take care of their omegas—an outdated viewpoint he’d inherited from his very traditional grandmother.
But I was always raised with a more modern standpoint, thanks to seeing it with my omega mum and alpha dads.
It was supposed to be a give and take, like a bunch of well-oiled cogs all working together.
Enzo was stubborn though and it usually ended up with him burning the candle at both ends until he crumbled and Artie and I worked to pick up his pieces.
Even now I could hear the rumble of his voice in the office as he spoke on the phone.
A wet nose pushed into my palm and I glanced down to find Lucky looking up at me with plaintive brown eyes.
“Oh no you don’t,” I scolded him softly. “This food isn’t for you.”
The golden retriever let out a whine before giving up and returning to the living room where Charm was still asleep.
Not trusting that Lucky wouldn’t come back and try to sneak some food once I turned my back, I put all of it into the microwave and even then I wasn’t sure it would work.
Lucky could open doors thanks to his brief stint in guide dog training school of which he’d failed out of stupendously. He was incredibly intelligent—far too intelligent for his own good. He could open doors, find objects, and more and all of the skills he’d learned, he put to use driving us all mad every day.
“Don’t touch,” I commanded, pointing two fingers at my eyes and back to him in an ‘I’m watching you,’ gesture.
Lucky huffed a breath that I was sure was the doggie equivalent of ‘fuck you’ before putting his head on Charm’s back and closing his eyes.
Pushing the door to the office, I found Enzo pacing back and forth as he spoke on the phone with someone.
“Yes sir, I look forward to getting back to you later this week. No, I know this is an amazing opportunity, but I need to speak with the rest of my pack first,” Enzo was saying as our eyes met and he held up a finger telling me to wait. His words were spoken with more of an American accent than they usually were, telling me that whoever was on the other end of the line must be from the states.
“Uh-huh, yep, thank you so much, bye now.”
“Who was that?” I asked casually as I tossed myself down into the comfy chair in the corner of the room. It was Artie’s favorite to sit in and watch Enzo as he worked—or it had been before he’d started losing his sight.
“Colt Stone,” Enzo said with a note of disbelief in his voice. “He’s offered me a job announcing events at his sports complex in Seattle.”
My brain stuttered to a halt because I recognized the name.
Though I’d blocked Ciara on my phone, in my weaker moments I’d looked her up online and found pictures taken by others of her at weddings and family outings.
And in those pictures it would have been impossible not to recognize one of the youngest billionaires in the world—especially one who had dedicated his life to being a patron for winter sports athletes.
He was also mated to Ciara’s sister.
“Do you think he knows?” I asked, swallowing the sudden lump in my throat, my mind going back to the desolate expression on Ciara’s face as she yelled at me in the lobby of the hotel earlier.
Enzo shrugged, scrubbing a hand over his dark beard. “I doubt Colt Stone has the time to be keeping up with who his sister-in-law dates, Lei. He told me he listened to my broadcast of Team USA’s game last night and he was impressed.”
It was the kind of recognition Enzo had been pushing for ever since he’d moved to the UK permanently after university.
Working his way into sports commentating at the BBC had been hard enough for him. Most people didn’t want to hear an American man talking about sports on their telly, even if that American had spent the majority of his life in Europe.
A chance to be the dedicated hockey announcer for Colt Stone’s famous sports center was the offer of a lifetime.
“And there’s a doctor in Seattle who has an experimental trial for glaucoma that I think we can get Artie into.”
I sighed, there was the other shoe that I’d been waiting for him to drop.
“Enzo…” I started as carefully as I could, but the other man shook his head vehemently and stopped my next words.
“Leith, I’m not just going to let him lose his eyesight at the breakneck pace that he currently is losing it at—no matter what he says.”
Once Artie had been diagnosed, Enzo had thrown himself into research about the eye disease that was taking our omega’s sight. For the first three months he didn’t eat or sleep and he very nearly was fired from his job because of his obsession.
That stint had ended with Artie refusing to talk to him until he let it go and let Artie make choices about himself and his rapidly increasing blindness.
But Enzo could never truly let go of anything. It was one of the reasons we loved him so much.
“No—I know we can’t cure it—but this doctor has made some serious strides in prolonging eyesight and he’d be there anyway.” Enzo clasped his hands together as if he was trying to plead with me.
A heavy sigh whooshed out of me, compounding the bone-deep exhaustion I was feeling after the events of the past few days. “I’m not the one you have to convince, Enz, but I also won’t go against Artie’s wishes.”
“Fine by me, but we should talk more about it when Artie wakes up for the day—he’s still sleeping off the drinks from dinner,” Enzo said with a half-grin that told me that our omega was probably sleeping off more than just the alcohol.
We’d all been ecstatic when he’d medaled for his event and had spent a large chunk of the evening at a fancy restaurant celebrating. It had been on our walk back to our flat that we’d run into Ciara.
The medal wasn’t the gold that Artie had been shooting—almost desperately—for, but it was a silver which was more than most of the male figure skaters could claim after yesterday.
“Speaking of sleeping things off, you look rough bud. Why does it look like someone ran you over with a truck?” Enzo asked, nodding at me.
I frowned at that before glancing over at the mirror that hung on one of the walls.
I looked, in a word, disheveled. My hair was coming out of its tie and it floated around my temples in messy waves. My clothing was also a disaster—probably from all of my anxious tugging of it on my walk back to our flat.
“I ran into Ciara in the lobby of the hotel,” I admitted, not looking at my packmate as I spoke. “We got into it.”
Enzo was quiet for a moment, as if gathering his thoughts. “And did you get the closure you wanted?”
Enzo had seen all of my panic attacks and had dealt with my trust issues when he and Artie had opened their pack to me. The fear that I would wake up one day and they would be gone rode me hard for the first year until we made the decision to bond me into the pack.
“Yes—no—I don’t know,” I said, putting my face in my hands and rubbing it hard with a sharp inhalation of breath. “It might have made me feel worse. She said she never wants to see me again.”
Enzo was silent for another moment before he sighed and shook his head. “Well, I think that might be a problem if we do end up moving to Seattle. But she’ll have to deal with it.”
“She’s not a bad person, Enz.” There was more reproach in my voice than usual when Enzo criticized Ciara.
The other alpha’s lips pressed together into a tight line. “Maybe not, but she’s human embodiment of a fucking tornado. You’re usually the solid one in the pack, and here you are looking like she’s broken your heart all over again. Hell, even Artie is talking about how good she smelled. Are you forgetting that we picked up all of the pieces of you three years ago and glued you back together like you were Humpty Dumpty?”
I hadn’t forgotten and I was grateful for how patient my packmates were with me.
“Why are you two yelling at each other?” Artie’s sleepy voice came from the doorway where he stood rubbing at his eyes.
“Sorry, babe,” Enzo said, crossing the room and pulling the omega into his arms. “We didn’t mean to wake you.”
Lucky and Charm pushed their way into the room behind the embracing pair, Charm hovering right next to Artie’s legs while Lucky started playing with one of the chew toys on the floor with far too much energy for how early it was.
“Well, you did.” Artie yawned as he accepted a kiss from Enzo before leaving him to come to me.
I opened my arms automatically, sighing with relief as he settled into my lap and snuggled in close, his orange scent filling my nose.
“Mmm, you smell good,” Artie murmured, pressing his lips to the column of my neck. “Like an apple pie.”
His words undercut what Enzo had said earlier about Artie also liking the way Ciara smelled.
What if you somehow manage to bring all of them together into one pack?a tiny, selfish voice whispered in my head. Then you get the best of every world.
I shoved the voice down deep and pressed a soft kiss to the top of Artie’s wild bedhead.
“I saw her,” I told him quietly as there was no point in lying. “And she read me the riot act.”
“Well you did ghost her a bit,” Artie pointed out.
As if my feelings about Ciara weren’t split enough, Artie was usually the one to play Devil’s Advocate when we spoke of her.
“That’s not the point, Artie,” Enzo said to him with a heavy sigh.
Artie stuck his tongue out at him, earning himself Enzo’s first smile of the day.
“Let’s talk more about it over breakfast,” I told him softly, pressing another kiss to the side of the omega’s head. “I picked up Quinn’s.”
Artie’s expression lit up and he scrambled up off my lap with a crow of delight.
“You’re the sexiest man I’ve ever met, Leith Dougall!” he called teasingly over his shoulder as he hurried back out into the hall.
I knew the way to every omega’s heart was through their stomach, and Quinn’s made some of the best breakfast around.
For a moment, as we ate breakfast together and chatted as if it were any other morning, I could forget about the beautiful alpha with dark eyes and a shattered heart that I wanted nothing more than to put back together.